It's the only way to be sure [Open]

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

So many people had recommended the Media Library to Soren that it ended up being one of the first locations on-ship that he paid a visit to. As promised, there was plenty of information to be found in convenient, electronic format.

Convenient for everyone who wasn't essentially from a medieval time period and thus had no framework for understanding computers, let along databases.

Losing patience, Soren began mashing the controls on some kind of instrument panel, and was rewarded with a moving picture featuring humans being menaced by floating tin plates, a woman singing about less-than-optimal romantic encounters, and some sort of storybook featuring a blue-skinned 'space explorer' and his evil nemesis (both with rather improbable hair).

"Infernal machine," he hissed, hitting the table with one small, bony magefist. "I'll show you a bad romance."

As far as he was concerned, the future should be destroyed. With fire.

Comments

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

Soren grimaced. "I have no doubt."

"Ships are powered by sails, though we rarely make use of them -- there are only a few island countries, and they rely mainly on air power. None of them are particularly welcoming of outsiders."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Probably the easiest way to categorize would be by energy method, then." And golly, has it been a while since she studied fuel economies in college. "Man and animal power, steam power, electrical and combustion, nuclear, and...whatever people have beyond my time."

She extends a hand. "I'm Eva, by the way. I tend to forget to introduce myself."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Ah, so we are the unfortunate primitives stuck at the forefront of that list." Soren eyed her proffered hand a little dubiously; that green woman had made much the same gesture. This time he tried extending his own, tapping her palm.

"Soren, of the Greil Mercenaries. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

She'll go with a palm tap. She gives a warm smile, remembering how stressful the first few days, adjusting to Stacy, were. "From the sounds of it, your world had different advantages. Most worlds I know never had load-bearing beasts that could go through the sky. Anyway, steam technology is - have you ever boiled something and had pressure come from the steam? It's harnessing that. Locomotives and ships ran on it for a while."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Hmm. And apparently a number of them had no magic of any kind, either." What kind of lifeless world had no magic, anyway? What did the people do, sit around and wait for wounds to heal?

"I don't do much cooking, but I'm familiar with the phenomenon. Interesting that someone would harness it as a source of power, though. I assume it must take quite a bit of steam to move something as big as a ship. It took several dragons to do the same when our ship ran aground."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Hey, my world has no magic," she says with a face far too serious to be taken as anything but comical. "But yes, after that people figured out that you can set fire to gas and that makes things go, too."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"So, the face of progress is learning to burn ever more impressive things?" It was hard to tell if Soren was serious. "Pity. Magic might have helped there."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Pretty much. You should see what happens when we heat up uranium. It's positively impressive." She nods. "I imagine it lets you take a lot of shortcuts."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

His smile was... not entirely pleasant, but not wholly unpleasant?

"Less than you'd think; I specialize in combat-oriented magic. However, I can spark a campfire quite handily. Not to brag, of course.

"And what about you? What is a world without magic like?"

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"So you're a warrior, I'm guessing." Her face takes on a slight tension. Everyone here seems to be of some kind, or some sort of survivor. She supposes that's a good thing - better to keep the horror localized to a few experienced people than subject too many newbies to it.

"Well, we have aliens. So it's still...exciting, I guess." She twists her mouth a bit, running a finger over her forearm. "I've never been on a world with magic, so I have nothing to really compare it to."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Hmm. Well, where I come from, warriors generally carry around giant battleaxes. So in that sense, no. But I have seen my fair share of battles. Our mercenary troupe is small in number, so there's little room for people who can't at least hold their own. Many of us have multiple functions to perform." Except for Shinon, whose second job appeared to be complaining loudly about Ike.

Soren raised an eyebrow. "And you have no stories about it, either? I'm surprised, given the breadth of frivolous entertainment I found here."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Well, a combatant, then. Might as well be precise with my language." Soren doesn't seem too banged up for a mercenary, bar the strange mark on his forehead. Healing magic?

"We do, but there are so many different types and settings, and while I'm not going to say reading isn't engaging, it's not the same as living in it." Eva would be the last person to say a truly negative thing about reading, after all. "Honestly some of the technology we have may as well be magic. I have to do a rain dance to get the computer to work on any given day."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

Don't look too hard at that brand, Eva. Soren's a little weird about it.

"Hmm. I fail to understand the appeal of technology that doesn't do what it was created to. Why bother creating it at all?" A pity Eva wasn't even willing to put forth conjecture. He'd simply have to learn about technology-based cultures on his own.

"I daresay that when and if I'm ever on the ocean floor, I would prefer I not be in the hands of a machine whose reliable operation I cannot trust in. I am not particularly enamored of drowning to death."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

She won't. She'd rather no one's eyes linger on her scars and will afford the same courtesy.

"It was a joke. Most of our technology does what you want it to do if you cajole it enough. Probably not unlike your magic."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

Well, it was more like a birthmark than a scar. Same difference.

He sighed. "Magic works on some very basic principles. Once you learn the spells, they're reliable. You don't need to navigate through some ridiculous, complex interface just to perform a simple task. And the worst you can do while casting a spell is destroy something by accident."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Once you've learned a technology, it's usually fairly reliable. I haven't seen the comm system go down yet, for example." She raises an eyebrow. "Oops, sorry I set you on fire, I meant to point my wand at that tree?"

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Well, that excuse tends to work only one time per person. Twice, if you're lucky."

That was a Soren-joke.

"In any case, magic is generally learned under the supervision of experienced sages. So there isn't too much potential for disaster. It helps that tomes are written in a dead language. Difficult for fools to blunder into."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

Eva gives a surprised laugh. She wasn't expecting a sense of humor out of him, even a sardonic one.

Arrogance, though, doesn't surprise her. For all she knows, he's earned it. "And I take it you've been thoroughly trained, to feel comfortable using it?"

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

Soren occasionally made a joke or two. Occasionally.

"...You might say that, yes." Thoroughly and rather unpleasantly trained. "After my instruction, I continued studying as I had the time. By now, it's more or less second nature. But that's true of any profession -- if you stick around long enough, anyway."

He sighed. "I find it alarming how many untrained 'Chosen' are aboard this vessel. I met a boy of nine or ten with no real battle experience whatsoever. How is he expected to defend himself?"

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Children surprise you," she says with no real lightness in her voice. "But we try to keep them safe. It's all up to the damn ship at the end of the day, who stays and who goes, who's in danger or not, besides the space fighter combat. But I expect it's because Stacy expects to keep us here for a very long time, and in ten years that nine year-old boy will have had his formative years spent in a war zone."

She bites her fingernails.

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Ah, yes. This ship. I wonder by what standards it chose to kidnap those that it did. By notoriety? In which case there were plenty of individuals that might have been better equipped to deal with this... conflict." Someone about to die anyway, maybe. Zelgius. Greil.

He looked grim. "I am not planning to spend ten years on this vessel." Because by then there might be questions he didn't want to answer. By twenty, almost certainly.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"It couldn't have been by notoriety. We've got some relative unknowns on board, supposedly, although I guess it would be within reason to lie about being famous." Eva would know, after all. She kept her own notoriety hidden for several months onboard.

"Neither am I. But the way this is set up, it seems like people are thinking more longterm than you or me. It might not be up to us," she says. Her voice has a bitter edge to it. She's tired of other people deciding her life for her.

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Fate, then?" Soren scoffed. "I'm not really one for lying down and accepting the inevitable, good or bad. One way or another, this conflict will be over. And I plan on being on the winning side. Regardless of how I got here."

Did it matter if there were overwhelming odds conspiring against him?

...no, not really.

He taps the table. "And the sooner I can learn what I need to, the sooner I can help bring that about."

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

"Fate doesn't have to mean lying down and accepting the inevitable. I believe in it and I intend the same things as you."

She stands up. "Well, unfortunately, my specialty is obviously not in technology. If you need help finding books or alcohol, I tend to specialize in that instead."

[facepunching.livejournal.com]

"Books?" That piques his interest. "What sort of books?"